The Scar
by TheWaffleMonster
Summary: It smiled up from her abdomen like a stitched-shut mouth, hideously beautiful and painted with faded red lipstick. Buried beneath layers of rich, scarlet fabric, the hollowness and the scar remained, thin and long and grinning and red. Life had leaked out through that neat little wound. It bled and it burned away, with flames taller than those that graced the Phantomhive manor.


**Author's Note: Yet another piece of un-beta'd work, unless you count my sister reading it through once and saying "Looks fine to me." **

**If only you guys could have seen the original draft. I wrote it at one in the morning, and I don't think I've ever written anything crappier. It was horrible! Thankfully, I got the chance to pretty much entirely rewrite the thing. **

**I am hopelessly addicted to Black Butler. Pretty artwork asides, the characters fascinate me. Every single one of them is worthy fanfiction material (with the possible exception of Claude, who I don't like much. At all.) And I enjoy trying to look into their minds and see what makes them tick—or perhaps, more appropriately, what gears don't quite mesh the way they should. **

**I, like many other people, think Madame Red is one of the most fascinating characters in the series. To be frank, I'm surprised I haven't written about her before now.**

* * *

When the doctor had first told her, speaking from behind his clipboard and thick-framed glasses, the words had slipped into her mind as a string of meaningless syllables. She sat unresponsive, staring at the whitewashed wall. There was a beetle crawling across the smooth surface, walking but going nowhere. Aimless, meandering forwards with no destination in mind. It had no purpose.

The letters remained insignificant until the moment they formed words, until the moment when she found herself standing, allowing a nurse to help her change out of her hospital gown and into one of her regular lavish dresses in anticipation of her return home.

It smiled up from her abdomen like a stitched-shut mouth, hideously beautiful and painted with faded red lipstick. She asked the nurse; it was too clean, too precise a wound to have been caused by the accident. The brown eyes opened wide in the young, pretty face as she stuttered.

"B-but—ma'am—I though y-you knew..."

Buried beneath layers of rich, scarlet fabric, the hollowness and the scar remained, thin and long and grinning and red. They remained when dates ticked past on the calendar. An anniversary. A birthday. Life had leaked out through that neat little wound. It bled and it burned away, with flames taller than those that graced the Phantomhive manor, tinting the sky a brilliant, orange-edged carmine.

The hospital had offered her as much time off as she needed to recover, but she came back to work within three weeks.

In the past, observing the grief of patients and their families had been uncomfortable, awkward, but not unbearable. She'd always found herself longing to say something, to comfort them, to ease their pain.

A child had died. Stillborn, delivered five months premature.

She hadn't realized what has happening until she was staring into the washbasin, panting. Her mouth tasted foul.

She only threw up once. Even when the first woman came in, she was calm. In her silence, in polite smiles, in casual talk as the necessary forms were filled out, she hated them. Their vulgar accents disgusted her. Their coarse language turned her stomach. What did a child matter to them, so long as the money and the men kept coming? What was they care for the life growing inside them, so long as their trade flourished?

In rooms that smelled of soap and anesthetic, she was numb. Her hands were as cautious and as skilled as always, her demeanor as cool and collected. Thoughts rose, hovered, floated shallowly under the surface of her mind.

After the third procedure, washing her hands as the aides began cleaning up the mess, she glanced into the wastebasket.

It was covered in blood, tiny and fragile and perfect. She could count the fingernails.

Her husband had always liked her hair long. As she cut it, the smooth locks fell into the basin of water and stayed there, twisting and waving gently like long, scarlet ribbons. She felt as though she were cleaning a wound.

_Waste not, want not, _she thought bitterly.

She did not sleep that night. She stayed up, turning the knife over in those precise surgeon's hands. She saw the red-drenched hand, and counted again without meaning to (_3, 4, 5.)_

It was dreadfully unfair, she thought, that she should be the only one who hated the color red.

Red.

_1, 2…_

What she wanted most was someone else's trash, carelessly thrown aside.

_3, 4…_

They didn't deserve to carry life, be it another's or their own.

_5. _

Her red-painted lips curved into a sardonic smile.

_Waste not, want not. _


End file.
